Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In 1980, during my junior year of high school, our glee club was scheduled to perform in the USSR, but the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan a few months earlier, so we were rerouted to Romania and Bulgaria. (My debut solo performance—which was very nearly my swan song, given my sonorous but strident baritone—consisted of my singing the Spanish folk song “Ríu Ríu Chíu” in a nursing home outside Pleven, Bulgaria’s seventh most populous city.) I had never even heard of anyone’s going to those countries. Before we left the United States, several teachers and other wise adults advised me that whereas Bulgaria was a Soviet puppet state and a terrible place, Romania had a brave, independent leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who refused to obey orders from Moscow. Once we arrived in Bulgaria, however, we all experienced unaffected warmth. Even when our lead soprano, Louise Elton, and I were briefly carried off by a troupe of Gypsies, the mood remained cheerful. In Romania, by contrast, we saw scenes of repression every day that stood in stark contrast to our hosts’ attempts to persuade us that their country was free and liberal. A patient tried to wave at us from a hospital window, only to be pulled back fiercely by an army-uniformed attendant who immediately lowered the blinds. Anxious-seeming Romanians approached on the streets and asked us to smuggle out letters for them, but were afraid to engage in conversation. Glowering military personnel could be seen at every corner. We were forbidden to explore in Bucharest on grounds that “here in Romania, we have no funny nightlife,” a remark we took great delight in repeating throughout the rest of the trip.

After we returned, I reported that Bulgaria was charming and Romania, a creepy police state. Everyone who knew better told me how wrong I was. When the regimes later changed, it turned out that the Ceauşescus were not so admirable—that Romania’s was quite possibly the most repressive regime in Eastern Europe. That was a good lesson about intuition: places that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.

Nearly three decades later, I interviewed Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. He was in some ways persuasive: beautifully dressed in a Savile Row suit, eloquent in English, socially well connected, and gracious in his grand fashion. He was also ominously self-absorbed and a patent liar; his buoyant narrative of Libyan life was so much at odds with what I saw and heard firsthand that it seemed almost like performance art. A few years after my visit, I was invited to a breakfast for Saif Qaddafi organized by a prestigious foreign-policy association. After his twenty-minute oration, each of us was invited to ask a question. I was astonished by the deferential posture of the interlocutors, many of them seasoned diplomats. When my turn came, I said, “All of what you have promised will happen is the same as what you were promising five years ago, and none of it has so far come to pass. On what basis are we to presume that those promises now have merit?” I was admonished afterward for having been rude to a “gifted statesman” who represented “our best hopes for North Africa.” Saif Qaddafi is now imprisoned and wanted for prosecution by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity after his disastrous behavior in the Libyan revolution, during which he announced that “rivers of blood” would flow if the populist uprising continued. A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.

The summer after I finished college, I visited my friend Pamela Crimmins, who had landed a job as personal photographer to the American ambassador in Morocco. At the time Morocco had no cell phones and few landlines, so we had arranged beforehand that Pamela would meet me at the airport when I arrived in Rabat, the capital. It was the first time I’d ventured alone to a place so remote from my life experience. I landed at night, found no one waiting to greet me, and panicked. A man with a decrepit car offered to drive me to Pamela’s apartment building, where I started up the staircase, calling “Pamela!” at every floor, until I finally heard her sleepy voice say, “Andrew?” In hindsight, the events of that evening were trivial, but I remember my mounting terror at being in a foreign place and not knowing how to take care of myself. I was scared as much by my ingenuousness as by any real sense of threat.